Protector
by The Smiling Shadow
Summary: Johnny Topside went through extensive trial experiments to go from a man into a Protector. This is how it happened.
1. Fontaine Futuristics

They were all stacked together in that tiny single cell, laying on each other's shoulders. This was their only comfort for they were like brothers now, spending nearly every waking hour alone or with each other. The bare and boney shoulder of some stranger you knew better than any one else, this was the only comfort they knew back then. In this manner he slept on his friend's shoulder, knowing soon they'd all be taken away. He felt someone grab his arm and pull him away with a hard tug. Every couple of weeks or so they were transferred from the Labs to the Show floor of Fontaine Futuristics where they'd be forced to show the happy and rich of Rapture how they could genetically alter themselves next.

The sedatives were wearing off by the time they were all rushed to the make up room. They weren't necessarily allowed to speak to the make up girls, but sometimes they'd forget. He sat motionless on a chair, chained to the floor. The make up girl was young and beautiful, he couldn't even bare to look at her. But he felt her with her gently put powder all over his face to hide his wounds and scars. They were splicing him up nearly every day and he was starting to look it. He hadn't been able to get a glimpse of himself in the mirror, but by the looks of the other test subjects he knew he couldn't look that much better. He felt her trying to cover some growth on the side of his head that was making some of his hair fall out. Luckily they had a wig for him so she moved on to his arms, covering up the wounds there.

He couldn't even remember which of those scratches were from Persephone and which were from the Labs.

The make up girl finished up on him and smiled. He finally looked at her, deep and sad eyes that she just kept smiling at.

"There you go, now you're handsome again." She said.

They had to look pretty for the crowds. They couldn't scare off the citizens of Rapture away from splicing with their grotesque reactions to all the new Plasmids they were being tested with. So every time they were brought to the show floor the make up girls would come in and cover up all the pain. They were all getting worse though. There were normal signs of thinning of course, the diet of a lab rat was not a great one. But then there were the abnormalities, the tumors and growths sprouting from broken down genetics. It was like they all had cancer, bones grew too big for the skin, hair was falling out, and flesh kept growing.

They were testing new Plasmids being developed. They were given prototypes and when those failed they'd have to be given counteractive Plasmids to save their lives. People weren't meant to splice like this. Maybe they weren't meant to splice at all. Once they tried to give his old cell mate the ability to breath underwater. He grew gills and suffocated to death because he couldn't breath the normal air anymore. Someone got to test the first trial of Incinerate, his skin started burning and he burst into flames, but he wouldn't die. He screamed at the pain but he wouldn't die. The doctors left him alone because they thought the fire would burn his nerve endings and he'd either stop feeling the pain or would die, but he kept on living, and he kept on feeling the pain. He doesn't know what the doctors ending up doing with that guy. A couple of them died because of hypothermia from Winter Blast, one of the guy's who first tried it had his blood instantly freeze inside him. Then there were some guys with misshapen muscles or legs that couldn't stop running from SportsBoost and the like.

But the fit ones, the ones like him who were at least somewhat presentable were taken the show floor with successful Plasmids. But like he said, they were all getting worse. Luckily the audience was twenty feet away from them so you could hardly tell they were wearing more make up than Sander Cohen. The distance was excused for the audience safety, but that was all a lie.

They were marched up to behind the curtain, their chains being removed by the doctors. He held up his left hand, it wouldn't stop shaking. He had a piercing headache that followed him into his dreams and it felt like there was some sort of crack in his skull that reached all the way down his spine. He reached weakly for one of the doctors as they passed by checking off the inmates. The Doctor stopped and he tried to form the words to speak but something in his head disconnected and he seemed to forget what he was going to say. The Doctor turned away, frustrated but he held onto her.

"My hands." He finally coughed out. "They won't stop shaking."

She looked at him coldly, indifferent. She looked at her clipboard.

"That's a normal reaction, it'll go away in time." She said.

"It's not." He said, that's all he could say.

"It will go away in time."

He had more to say to her but the words wouldn't come. The headache was getting worse and he couldn't think past it. He knew he needed Adam, that's what this headache was. But he cursed himself, knowing it was the Adam that was killing him.

He heard the familiar roar of applause. A small shock went through the entire group of subjects, one of the Doctor's using Electro Bolt to wake them up, now was their time to shine. The group straightened their backs, and prepared as the curtain was drawn and bright lights shined down on them.

They were on the stage now, a large platform with some water between them and the audience and podiums that when activated via a Plasmid let out confetti and what not, those were crowd pleasers.

Dr. Alexander walked out to the front of the stage, looking nervous and he held index cards in his hands.

"Ladies and Gentlemen, we at Fontaine Futuristics and Ryan Plasmids work tirelessly to bring you the latest and greatest genetic wonders. Our wonderful volunteers here will now demonstrate some of our newest sensations."

Dr. Alexander turn to them then and they did their dance routine. Fire from their hands and ice and electricity. They made tornadoes on the floor combined with fire. They jumped onto the tornados, landing on the feet on the ceiling with claws the Doctors had made them. Machines were deployed that the subjects dodged and together forced to the water where they sent electrical shocks into it, disabling it. All while the audience laughed and clapped their hands.

He was pouring fire out of his palms when he began to notice something wrong with one of the other subjects. The audience was clapping as his hands and blood were burning. It was then he was looking up to the ceiling to watch as some of the boys climbing the walls weren't doing their routine. They were talking to each other and motioning to the bullet-proof glass that separated them and the audience. He kept thinking oh, no as the audience clapped.

Finally one of the boys dropped down from the ceiling, sticking his claws into the glass. The audience screamed. Another one touched the glasses with his palm, covering it in ice. The audience stood up in the chairs, they could no longer see the performance but they could hear as the test subjects on the other side of the glass banging up against it. Cracks began to form. The boys clawed at the glass, ramming into it with their modified bones and muscles, trying desperately to get out. They were pushing against the glass with their combined telekinesis, together trying to pry the glass from the wall.

"We'll kill them!" They were screaming. "We'll kill them all for this!"

He wondered why he was so surprised by this behavior, they were after all criminals from Persephone. He stood at the center stage, watching as the other subjects were brought into the frenzy. This was a jail break, and innocent snobs were going to suffer. They all gathered by the glass side, and he saw them all, standing in the water. He frowned, and sent lightning from his fingertips into the water. His friends and brothers fried and fell into the water. He pushed the Crawlers who stuck to the glass down with a loud thud with telekinesis. They fell into the electrified water.

The audience paused and stared at the frozen window. Slowly a hand print formed on the other side of the glass and it began to melt the glass away. He was warming the ice with his Incinerate and he was the only one the audience saw once the ice thawed. They smiled and began clapping.

He stared at them, saddened, now alone. He had murdered his friends to the applause of the happy innocent snobs. He frowned and took his place back at center stage. The bodies were in the water and the audience couldn't even see them. Dr. Alexander came onto the stage, clapping and smiling along with them.

"Let's give our volunteer a hand, nice little show, eh?

The curtain drew, the doctors argued amongst themselves, orderlies came out to collect his friends' bodies. He looked up, not wishing to move unless someone told him to, but it seemed he'd been forgotten as the doctors clicked their tongues and cast out blame for the outburst. It was madmen, some of them said, they were criminals, but others were blaming the splicing. He finally took a step towards them and they all suddenly paused and hushed themselves.

He looked at them and held up his glowing hands with lightning in them.

"My hands. They won't stop shaking." He told them.

The arguing continued as they took him back into the Labs. A doctor put her palm to her forehead and took his arm, a tube stuck out of his forearm ready for their injections. She injected a familiar cold serum into him and instantly he felt like his head was floating away from him and he grew silent. His make up was smearing off, his hair continued to fall out and he felt the pain slip away as the Doctors' voices continue on in their endless droning. He shut his eyes and tried to remember what the sun looked like.

When they finally got to the Labs he was placed on a stretcher and taken through the halls. His other friends and brothers watched and noted that he was the only one to return from another one of those shows. He didn't care anymore that he had killed them, he knew their efforts would've been fruitless anyway, Ryan's forces were more spliced up than they were. What were they going to do, fight their way to the surface? He heard the rumors anyway, he knew there was a war outside the Lab walls. Wasn't the lab then the safest place to sleep and die?

He slept inside his own skin, feeling the headache start to return and his bones began to hurt again. His fire was burning from the Incinerate and he was trying to fight the pain off just so he could sleep a little longer and dream of the sun.

He heard voices in his room but he couldn't make them out. Whoever they were they began to touch him, pressing against his chest and checking his pulse. He finally opened his eyes to see the blurry images of a woman and a man examining him.

"This one looks familiar." Brigid Tenebaum noted.

"Well, that's Johnny Topside." A nurse replied from the doorway. "You know, the diver that used to be in the papers back when."

He looked up at the woman, Brigid Tenebaum, who was laying a gentle hand on his check. She stared at his glazed eyes and he thought she was beautiful too.

"Open your mouth, please." Tenebaum asked.

He heard her but didn't understand, she opened his jaw for him and stared down his throat for God knows what reason. She closed his jaw and then lifted one of his eyelids, flashing a light into his eyes. He turned away from her.

"I'm sorry, I have to." She told him.

She again pulled open his eyelids, staring at him as he stared into her.

He suddenly felt something bang against his knee and his leg kicked up. Tenebuam looked back at Yi Suchong.

"Reaction time is still good." Suchong nodded. "A little underweight, but should be no problem."

Tenebaum looked down at him once again, it struck him how terribly sad she looked.

"Yes." She agreed with Suchong. "He'll do fine."

He didn't know what they were talking about, he didn't care. He was sick and dying, he knew that already. All he had to do was suffer and wait. He could do that, he thought, that would be easy. He felt the headache coming on and his Adam thirst building. He felt his bones grinding against new and torn muscle. He felt the fever and decided to sleep once more.

When he awoke next he was struck by how clean and quiet the lab he found himself in was. He looked down at his arms, no longer in the common restraints the doctors usually put him in. He noticed a new marking on his left hand, a dark triangle, Delta.

He heard someone coming up the hallway and he turned in a fright, but that's when he saw a little sickly looking girl pass by. She stopped and looked at him with glowing yellow eyes. She smiled before skipping off with Doctors following close behind her.


	2. Pheromones

It was a fixer-upper that was for sure, but at least it was theirs. A decent home for a decent family living off a decent salary. The floors creaked with every step, the sea air drifted inside despite the windows, but it was theirs. The faucets leaked and the shower barely had any warm water but it was theirs. The walls were a dark wood but she brought in color with the drapes and the carpets and her own floral-patterned dresses. Her hair is done up in a bun as she dusts the years off the shelves and he can't help but think how lucky he is.

They had just bought the crib and it brought so much life to that empty room. He stood in the doorway gazing at the lone crib, illuminated by the sun seeping in through the window shades, and he could see the rest of his life in front of him. The sun was just poking over the horizon. Time to go to work. She was asleep in their bed and he was staring at the crib.

"Don't give me any guff this time around." He was saying. "I'm telling ya, this thing's gonna start leaking any second."

"John, you go collect the fish and the crabs, I'll worry about strapping you into the suit, all right?" Another man tells him, a man he knew once, but now he can't even remember the man's name.

He's climbing into the diving suit and it feels like a coffin on the boat. It's only in the water; in that deep and cold place does the suit become him. Only then does the metal bend to his skin and he can walk on the ocean floor down where no man has ever walked before. There it is calm and lonely but he likes it in his own way. Away from the bills and the money problems, from the commotion and chaos of everyone above the water. With the fish and the coral he finds peace in the silence and time to think of the life he's about to lead.

He remembers that day was the first time he'd ever heard of a city called "Rapture," by the whispers of the ship hands. They said they knew friends who were shipping out to build a place called Rapture.

And he thinks to himself his Rapture is home in her arms.

Sometimes the walls leaked, he noticed. It was a city surrounded by water, it made sense for the water to seep in now and again. He was staring up at the corner of the ceiling, watching the water stains seep in. Someone asked him a question; he doesn't remember what it was. They pull at his arm and inject something into his arm and he can't even bring himself to care anymore.

"Do you know what Plasmids they used on you?" Brigid Tenebaum asks.

His eyes flicker away from the water stain and he looks at Tenebaum as though he's seeing her for the first time.

"Jonathan?" She asks.

He looks up at her, knowing at his core that's his name.

"Can you speak? Let me know that you understand me?"

He opens his mouth and takes in a long, hard breath.

"Hello." He says to her.

She smiles. He likes it.

"Hello." She replies. "I'm Brigid Tenebaum."

"Oh. Right. I'm sorry. My memory's not what it used to be."

"That's quite all right. Do you think you could tell me what Plasmids they used with you?"

He thinks and shakes his head slowly. He can feel the Adam thirst coming back, it's in his bones, and he knows it.

"They never told us the names. But. I can. I have fire." He lifts his hands. "I have fire. Lightning. I…have ice. I'm stronger. They made me stronger."

But then his hands slip back down on the table and he stares at Tenebaum that is all he knows. He watches her write all this down and he starts to notice the cramped, white room they're seated in. He knows this is another lab, but he can't help it though, he let's his hope get to him.

"Are you here to save me?" He asks her.

She looks up, hiding shock. He looks at her, pleading with his deep and sunken eyes. Her silence answers him and he looks away.

"I'm sorry." She tells him. "There's no saving you now."

He nods and feels the creaking noise in the deep of his neck. The burning's coming back and he lets go of hope for the last time. His hands start shaking and he can't make them stop. He grips his hands together, grinding together the bone but all they do is shake harder. Tenebaum sees this and reaches for his fists. She puts his hand over his and he can't remember the last time he felt skin so soft and warm. He looks up.

"It's withdrawal. From the Adam." She says.

He keels over himself, holding his hands together. She steps away from her chair and kneels down so that he may see her.

"It's the only thing that makes the pain stop." He tells her. "Then I can sleep. But when I wake up it's happening again. Like an itch in the back of my brain. With a headache that I can't think through."

She stares at him with piercing eyes.

"I can help you with this." She tells him. "That is why you are here."

"More experiments."

"Yes. But you will receive all the Adam you need, and you will be able to gather more."

He laughs at her and shakes his head.

"That stuff's killing me."

"It's killing Rapture. So we must save it."

"We?"

To this she nods.

"You're about to become the soldier Rapture needs."

He shakes his head.

"I couldn't join the army. Flat feet."

They took him away then, to a bedroom with no windows, but he could see the water stains in the corner of the ceilings. They strapped his arms and legs to the bed, something he was more than familiar with. They started an IV in his arm and he felt the cold relaxation of the drug. It was beginning to feel so insincere. The nurses huddled around him attaching wires to his ribs and chest. Then one came and brushed the hair out of his eyes, where it fell off his head and onto her hands. He saw the fearful look in her eyes but he paid no attention. They punched wires into his scalp and he couldn't even feel it.

He was staring at the water stains when she crept into his view and held his shaking hands.

"Now we begin." She tells him. "Long this process will be."

"You've done this before, then." He says. "What happened to the other guys?"

She stares and he smiles at her. He lifts his hand with the triangle on it.

"Delta. I'm your fourth man."

Then he laughs at the fear in her face.

"It's all right. You wouldn't be the first person to kill me." He lays his head back down. "I was dead the moment I came here."

She waits a moment before lifting a familiar red needle into his view. His eyes widen and he knows what it is, he can practically smell it.

"Adam." She says and punches it into his veins.

The headache stops, his bones stop aching and his skin stops burning. And for a beautiful moment he remembers the sun and her face and he remembers what he used to feel like. His eyes shut and his body shivers as his genes relax and begin to heal. Tenebaum looks on a moment longer before turning and leaving the room, he doesn't even notice.

Suchong is there waiting for her on the other side of the one-way glass.

"Alexander's prepping one of the girls, should be ready when we're done here." Suchong told her.

She looked through the glass to see the thin figure of Johnny Topside squirm in the sheets of his hospital bed and against his restraints. He smiled from ear to ear and she felt sick to her stomach. The monitors beeped on, measuring heart rate, blood pressure, and the electrical pulses of his brain.

"You talk to this one good." Suchong says. "Loved that bit about becoming a soldier earlier." He laughs.

"They started shooting people in Apollo Square. Fort Frolic's been locked up by that actor." Tenebaum said.

"Crazy people running around for stupid reasons. Ryan and Fontaine will kill each other, watch."

"We can't let it get that bad. That's why we're here."

"You shouldn't care so much. You know they're all prisoners."

"Aren't we all?"

In a fever dream he didn't notice all the tubes filling with some sort of dark red liquid, he didn't notice the machines coming to life, he didn't notice how terribly quiet the room became. They knew he could shoot lightning from his hands but a genetic map revealed that he was not immune to electricity. Suddenly a large television screen lit up to life near the ceiling. The room darkened and he opened his eyes to the blinding white light. Then slowly an image began to appear.

The surface. Sun. Flowers. Trees. People.

A little girl.

Then it fades to the streets of Rapture.

And an electrical shock shoots through his head down to his toes causing him to seizure.

The images would shift again. Back to the girl and the sun. Far from the bottom of the ocean. Far from the war.

Then the shocks would return with the images of the bloody streets.

He doesn't know how long this continued. And like all things he had experienced in that terrible city, he even got used to this. The Adam in his blood healed what wounds he was receiving, his DNA, already in constant shift, tried to adapt. Eventually the pain dulled, the shocks were expected, he did not fight this. He knew if this would not kill him, something else would. And he wondered briefly as he stared at the image of the girl and the sun, would he care?

When this process had finished they filled his veins with Adam and Plasmids. He laid there, partly conscious, they told him it would be risky to put him on anesthesia, but the Adam helped with the pain. Suchong opened him up and moved around his organs, working alongside the Plasmids, which he could feel had begun to rearrange his insides. Strange, in that dream-like state, feeling such a thing. He could hear voices but couldn't make out the words. He could feel their needles and their blades, he saw the blood on the floor, but it all felt so far away, like it wasn't his body they were opening up, but someone else's. He remembers they moved his head to the side and in the corner of the room he saw the figure of Brigid Tenebaum.

He doesn't remember coming into this room. He thinks quickly, have I been in this room before. And he thinks quickly, I forget these days, have I been in this room before. He looked up to the corner of the ceiling and found no water stains and he felt comfort in his heart that was confirmation to him that he had not been there before. Then he thinks back and can't seem to recall how he came to be in that room.

He moves slightly off the floor, his back is swore so he knows he's been lying there for some time. He moves his arms, seeing open IV tubes sticking out from his wrists. He stands and stretches, his bones creaking as he does so. He feels cold suddenly and touches the top of his head; his hair's been shaved off. He lifts his shirt; remember the surgery to find long lines of stitches across his sides. He wonders for a moment why he feels no pain.

Then he sees her.

A little girl, like the one from the television, standing in the opposite corner. She is sickly looking, and her eyes seem to glow. But she stands there, looking so afraid. He stands still, not daring to move. She takes a step back, hitting the corner walls. She frowns and turns away from him.

He gets on one knee.

"Hello." He says to her.

She looks away.

"My name is…"

He trails off, a word appears in his head but he can't remember how to make their sound. She looks at him, expecting him to finish. He sees the word in his mind's eye and knows that's his name.

"My name is…John?"

She looks at him, confused.

"Are you…Are you all right? Are you hurt?"

She slowly shakes her head.

He sits down in his corner, staring at her.

"Do you have a name?"

She nods.

"What is it?"

"Eleanor."

She speaks so quietly.

"That's a beautiful name, Eleanor." He tells her. "Now, are you sure you're all right? The Doctors haven't harmed you?"

She shakes her head.

"You can tell me."

She shakes her head.

"Have they hurt you?" She asks.

"They've got me a little roughed up."

He smiles, and this makes her smile.

He can't believe what he's seeing. A little girl, here, in those laboratories. It was one thing to experiment on prisoners, on grown men and women, but the thing before him was just a child. There was no excuse; there was no war terrible enough to warrant this. She may not have admitted to being hurt but it was clear as day they had done something to her. The longer he sat there staring at her the more he grew enraged. That all this time he'd been spliced and experimented on, it wasn't enough. He had suffered all this time and it wasn't enough for the powers that be. They still had to resort to experimenting on children. He had given up hope for his own good, he had accepted the fact that he was going to die this way. He had lived his life, he was at peace with that. How could Rapture expect the same sacrifice from a child?

He felt a surge of pain inside his skull then. Like someone was stabbing his eyeball from inside his brain. He lurched and held his head, trying to keep it all in one peace.

Eleanor watched him for a moment before slowly walking over to him. He tries to hold the pain back, he tries to hide it, desperately not wanting to frighten her. But the stabbing worsens and it feels like his skull is splitting open. And she marches on towards him, fearless, like a the little soldier he was so sure they were forcing her to be. Just like him. He holds out his arm to her, he tries to stop her.

But she touches his hand, taking it into her own, and the pain is instantly gone.

He gasps at how cold she feels and how she takes away all that pain. He looks at her and she's tracing the triangle on the top of his hand. Suddenly, right after the pain, a calmness washes over him. He suddenly feels warm and relaxed, like everything was going to be okay, everything was going to be like this moment from now on. He stared at the little girl, holding his hand, and he remembers what this feels like. It feels like being loved.

That's when he decided he wasn't going to let this continue. It was easy for him to lay down and die alone. But he wasn't going to stand by and let them kill a little girl as well. He knew in his heart, he'd kill the whole world if he had to in order to save her from this place. He'd get her out of there. Together they'd escape the doctors and all their experiments.

And somewhere, far from that lonely white room, Suchong and Tenebaum watched on television sets.

"Pheromone implants seem to be working." Suchong notes. "Though he's having a much stronger reaction than she is. Ah, well. Nothing can be perfect."


End file.
